• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 950 0

barbecue carried all the way from Marietta. Jay drags in a whole side of beef and gets a bunch of swaggering whiskey-sipping butch types to help her dig a hole in the backyard. They show off for each other, breaking up stones to line the fire pit. Lee watches them from the porch, giggling at me and punching down a great mound of dough for the oatmeal wheat bread she’d promised to bake. Women whose names I can’t remember bring in bowls of pasta salad, smoked salmon, and Jell-O with tangerine slices. Everybody is feeding each other, exclaiming over recipes and gravies, introducing themselves and telling stories about great meals they’ve eaten. My mama is in the kitchen salting a vat of greens. Two of my aunts are arguing over whether to make little baking-powder biscuits or big buttermilk hogsheads. Another steps around them to slide an iron skillet full of cornbread in the oven. Pinto beans with onions are bubbling on the stove. Children run through sucking fatback rinds. My uncles are on the porch telling stories and knocking glass bottles together when they laugh.

I walk back and forth from the porch to the kitchen, being hugged and kissed and stroked by everyone I pass. For the first time in my life I am not hungry but everybody insists I have a little taste. I burp like a baby on her mama’s shoulder. My stomach is full, relaxed, happy, and the taste of pan gravy is in my mouth. I can’t stop grinning. The dream goes on and on, and through it all I hug myself and smile.

Lupus

“You don’t get home often enough.”

It is August and high summer has fattened all the trees on Old Henderson Road, dried the road to powder and gray loose loam, coating the myrtle and dogwood trees with a flat white alkali stain. Temple sits on her porch while her oldest girl rinses her hairpins in a tub of bleach and spring water. Off in the yard, the dogs raise a dust cloud. I wipe sweat off my mouth and drink tea like I never left home.

Temple slides her palms on the worn porch step, flat and smooth under her hands, back and forth. We watch a long green trailer turn the corner, shear the leaves on the myrtle, just miss the leaning porch, the poplar, the young dogwood.

“That would have done it,” Temple laughs softly, open-mouthed and happy. “I could have put in the new plumbing this year ’stead of next. Anything that big’s got to be insured.”

I nod, scratch chigger bites on my ankles, unable to relax to pissing in the weeds, hoping that trailer comes back and pays for more than the plumbing. She married late, Cousin Temple did, married late and well—a steady boy, one of those Roberts from Asheville, a lean, freckled, still boy, as steady as she was and as quiet, a good son who loved his mother and never ran around like the other boys all the other cousins married early.

Temple rolls a little hair between two fingers and turns her red-tan face up into the sun slanting past the porch beams. This house, yard, dirt road, myrtle trees, kudzu holding the screens on the windows—none of it would stand up to a northern winter, a Yankee tax assessor, or an estate sale. But it puts Temple outside them, a property owner, something none of the rest of the family can imagine becoming. Temple has been an outsider all her life, though living on her own since her mama left her with her own mother when Temple was barely seven—a quiet red-faced seven as she is now a quiet red-faced woman whose hair shows gray where it lies close to her skull.

“You were a bean when you were a girl,” Temple tells me, “a string bean, and your sister was a butter bean. Your mama was a stretch of stringy pork, and together you didn’t make a decent Sunday dinner.”

When Temple laughs, her head goes back. Her long red hair shakes out, and all the gray she has so skillfully tried to hide flakes loose and flashes at me silver and white. “Temple,” I tell her, “you’re finally getting old.”

“Bullshit,” she flares. “And apple butter. I’m just more woman than the men in this town can handle. And I’ve more left to me than most people get to start out.